Step Five
by Meredith-Grey
Summary: Jess begins a post-rehab life in Louisiana following the release of a bestseller. His fame opens him up to contact from Rory. Post-series finale; non AU; literati.
1. Many Men

AN: I've been out of the game for a while so let me know how I'm doing. For the past year-and-a-half I've been working on my novel for my senior project. It's finally done, so now I have time for fanfics again. Please leave a review. I love feedback.

**Step Five**: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

--

His mother was always playing music when he was a kid. Janis Joplin, Nico, sometimes old-timey heroines like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. His mother's music gave him an appreciation for misery, something Liz was an expert on. She would make these plans—Nest year Jessie, next year we're going to move Down South to Louisiana, to North Carolina, to Tennessee—and every time it made him feel sick. At least in New York he had signs to point him in the wrong direction. South of the Mason-Dixon line, all his vantage points would be ass backwards.

She was always talking about buying an old pickup and getting out of the city. Even though he hated the idea of mosquitoes and sickly sweet tea and rickety screen doors, sometimes he wished his mother was serious. Escape was always a convenient option.

Liz was a romantic, and, being so, got herself into trouble in a social class full of blue-collar burnouts. Jess saw the light in his mother's face become replaced with a haggard, distracted expression. She was too busy orchestrating her working-class fantasy to see what she'd spun in her own home. But Jess noticed. He realized early on what it would cost to bring his mother back to where the rest of his family stood, and decided it wasn't worth the effort. However misguided, Liz was happier left alone. Maybe he should have done the same for himself.

--

When he turned twenty-four everything exploded, but his mother wasn't surprised. "I knew you would do it," she said, knitting needles clacking at the scarf and hat she made for him every Christmas. "You've always been special."

Luke agreed. On a creek in Connecticut, fishing pole held in his hands, baseball cap flipped backwards, he told Jess the truth. He'd read the book. "All I've got to say is, Jess, thank God you're alive."

"What do you mean?"

"You did a great thing. Probably the healthiest thing you'll ever do for yourself. I'm proud of you."

The space between his heart and the world was very small. Jess felt every word as is was delivered. "Thank you."

His uncle reeled in an empty line, examined the bait, and recast.

--

Prozac suited him well. And so did Lithium. Dr. Wolf told him that mental illness, most prominently depression, ran in families. Jess believed him.

It was before the book had hit the market, when it was still a winning lottery ticket for Random House, under wraps. "Am I always going to take this?"

"Of course not," the elderly doctor crooned, fatherly in his mismatched dress wear and spectacles. "Anti-depressants treat the illness, not the symptoms. I have a feeling that you'll do very well on this medication. Everyone's heard of Prozac for a reason."

Jess restricted the urge to open his mouth, to say, Everyone knows about Prozac because of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Christina Ricci and _Prozac Nation_, but he knew the doctor was right. After six weeks on the miracle drug he began to feel how everyone else in the world probably felt; maybe better. After three months Dr. Wolf added Lithium to his mental health cocktail, and he knew that it was finally over. All his aching cold black days of distance were cured. The glass visitation screen that had separated him from the world had lifted, attention and acclaim rushing in just in time for him to appreciate it.

In its first week _Five_ earned him enough money to support him for the rest of his life.

Jess socked it all away in a savings account and didn't spend a dime for a couple of weeks, praying that the cash landslide he'd started wasn't about to be claimed by someone else. A month went by, and he was famous.

Luke called with daily news. "You're on the television."

"Great," Jess deadpanned. Financial security was probably the best part of his book deal so far, but publicity was the worst. _Five_ had a spread in the Sunday _New York Times_, but he wasn't answering telephone calls. He'd unplugged his landline and switched his cell phone number.

Now he got invitations to important parties; more than just literary people knew his name. When his editor read the first draft of his book, he said, "This is a baseball bat to the head. Kid, this is the shit Oprah's Book Club is made of."

"I guess." He didn't write it to get closer towards anything but sobriety. He had seven months, twenty-three days, a handful of hours. "Don't expect the same thing when I finish step six."

--

He left the house only to go to NA meetings, to go to therapy with Dr. Wolf, to pick up groceries, to drop off signed copies of _Five_ at his favorite independent bookstore. Sometimes he'd go to a party in the Village, or a press management gig in Manhattan. He went to an interview with Evan Rachel Wood for the movie deal, and he got a letter in the mail from Henry Rollins. He'd blown Cormac McCarthy and James Frey and Chuck Palahniuk out of the water, and everyone knew it.

It felt different only for a little while. Eventually, it was just as normal as copping on Avenue D had been, or exchanging war stories with Courtney Love in rehab almost eight months ago. Jess had written the book in a matter of weeks, edited it in two, and mailed it off to the publisher only a few months post-rehab. In NA he had to face all the destructive shit he'd done to his body and everyone else in his life. All the names in the book were real. Jess figured that nobody would mind because it was supposed to be an apology. The only villain was himself.

--

_I always smoked heroin alone. If I had friends over we'd snort lines, because somehow that's more socially acceptable than holding some loaded aluminum foil over a candle, and I didn't start injecting until the very end. Most of the people I knew were drug users, not drug addicts, so cutting up lines and rolling dollar bills didn't feel foreign to them. _

_My friend Lucy got me into chipping. She introduced me to most of my contacts, taught me how to prepare heroin in its many forms, but she also laid out the rules. Use only once a week, twice at the most, with a couple of sober days in between to prevent addiction. Test your smack before you really dive into it. Quickly, though, I made my own rules. _

_Use when you feel sad, when there is nothing you could imagine doing besides heroin. Use when you feel lonely, when the idea of being around anyone seems more isolating than being by yourself. Use when you are in pain. Use all the time._

--

The first thing Jess figured out about NA was that dissociation was a plan for destruction. The only way to get better was to face it, to say: I am Jess Mariano, and I am a drug addict. This is happening to me and not someone else. I am the person sitting in this chair, having a panic attack whenever someone offers me Oxys at a party, knowing that, either way, if I say yes or no or maybe, I am going to die from suffocation from a heart attack from being burnt alive from my own panic.

Eventually it got easier. Jess moved into a new apartment, got a sponsor in NA, spent a lot of time visiting Luke and his mother and talking to Jimmy on the phone. His old man was proud, but solemn.

"You nearly died, Jess. What do you want me to say?"

Jess swallowed hard, tried to remember why he'd picked this sunny, inviting apartment over his old opium den. "You don't have to say anything. I understand."

Jimmy sighed. "I'm not angry with you, I'm proud, I really am. I just wish you didn't have to get it this way."

He tried not to take offense. "By telling the truth? Give me some time. I'll work on a sequel to _A Million Little Pieces_."

His father laughed, pulling the sound out over state lines and airwaves. Jess had never felt so alone.

--

For the first time in his life, going down south seemed like a viable option. He'd finished up the book tour for _Five_ and the constant calls and requests for interviews had gotten old. He'd come out of NA to find photographers on the sidewalk, usually just a couple, but still too many.

Jess went home and packed a bag. Lightweight clothes, short sleeves, his Ray Bans. He had an old Coup de Ville convertible in storage in Jersey. He secured refills and phone therapy with Dr. Wolf, assuring his doctor that he would be okay on his own for a couple of months. In April, it was still a little cool in New York. Jess decided it was time for a vacation.


	2. Blocked Intersection

Chapter 2: All Roads Lead to the Same Blocked Intersection

It only took him four-and-a-half hours to hit Richmond from Camden. His '69 Cadillac rode smoothly the whole way down, coasting over the asphalt like a shining metallic cloud. Jess drove with one hand on the leather steering wheel, the other twiddling the dial on his radio. Snaking his way through Maryland, he tried listening to NPR, but it was Science Friday with Ira Flatow and they were talking about mental illness. The topic was dissociative disorders: fugue states, multiple personalities, responses to tragic childhood events. Jess flipped the radio off and switched to Iggy Pop. The drive went by much more quickly.

The further south he drove the greener the landscape became. In preparation, Jess had read some Poe and _Their Eyes Were Watching God_, hoping to pick up at least a little on this unknown region before he arrived. He was heading towards New Orleans, so maybe Anne Rice would have been more appropriate.

Listening to his old favorites, Jess thought about Dee Dee Ramone and the kids who used to sniff glue and Freon in his apartment building. For a short period in seventh grade he'd been one of them, coating his undershirt with Scotchgard and holding it up to his face all day at school. In rehab he had to spend a lot of time thinking about all the crazy shit that he did when he was younger, teenage years included. Jess' first experience with harder drugs occurred when he was fifteen; he'd smoked weed as early on as middle school, but during his sophomore year he took two tabs of MDMA and never looked back.

One of the reasons he got sent to Stars Hollow was because he was always getting trashed on the weekends. On Friday nights Jess would go out with his friends, take Ecstasy, drink beer, smoke weed, do a little coke—if there was any around—and crawl back home in the morning. He spent the next day in a serotoninless fog, depressed and heavy, feeling like he had the flu. Liz noticed.

"I need your help with the groceries, Jess. Get up." She needed his help carrying things home from the store, but he could barely lift his head off the pillow.

"I think I'm sick."

"Again? Having a hangover doesn't count. C'mon."

Sometimes, if he was feeling generous, he'd go with his mom to the Korean store down the block, but never much further. "I've got homework to do," Jess would claim, dark circles under his eyes, coming down to cocaine blues and the day-after effects of Ecstasy and alcohol. If Liz was in a sympathetic mood she would share a joint with him, but that didn't happen often.

Jess' teenage polydrug use was the opening chapter to _Five_; he'd included it to show that club drugs had basically nothing to do with his eventual addictions. But a lot of people hadn't taken it that way.

--

"Have you read it yet?" Lorelai asked. Luke was still at the diner and she had the rest of the afternoon off. She'd placed a long-distance call to Rory in Texas.

"I'm reading it now, like everyone else in America," she replied. Rory found out about _Five_ when one of her old school friends had sent it to her in the mail, not even realizing that Rory was in the book. Gemma had attached a note: "I just know you'll love this. Mariano is probably the most distinct voice of our generation. Let me know how you like it."

"It's better than anything I could have written," Rory commented.

"Hooey," Lorelai protested. "Either way, Luke has been spending a lot of time with Jess. I don't think he likes all the attention. He left New York earlier today."

"For where?" Rory asked. She'd never been able to imagine Jess living somewhere else, not even when she had visited him in Philadelphia.

"Luke didn't say."

Rory tapped the cover of _Five_ with her foot, slowly pushing it off her coffee table. Her glaringly white apartment was cool, despite the arid Texas climate; the wood-stained ceiling fan went _clack clack clack_ against the heat. This was the time of night when she started to feel lonely, when the sky glowed copper and purple and the cicadas tuned up their evening symphony. This was when she usually called her mother.

"I read that article you sent me the other day. Kudos on he headline." Since Rory had started working for the _Dallas Observer_ she sent her mom her more interesting articles. Her most recent assignment had been about an environmental group who harassed local drivers that turned armadillos into road kill.

"Thanks, mom."

Lorelai filled Rory in on the goings on in Stars Hollow: Ms. Patty had started up a couples' salsa class and she was begging Luke and Lorelai to join, Sookie had taken some hilarious pictures of her kids in Easter bunny costumes and Rory just had to see them, Emily had gone to a new hairdresser and gotten some over zealous highlights that made her like a frosted blonde.

"Is grandma going back to her old beauty salon to get her hair fixed?"

"She would, but the reason she switched was because her old hairdresser died. Personally, I think she should keep the highlights. It makes her look like Anna Nicole Smith."

"It's not nice to make fun of dead people."

"Mom's not dead," Lorelai said cheekily. "Besides, you know how much I loved her TV show."

"I remember. You wore your fuzzy pink imitation hat for a week."

"Good times," she laughed. "Hey, it was really great to talk to you, but I've got to run. I'm in line at Doosey's—" she broke off.

"What is it?" Rory asked.

"_OK Magazine_ has expanded their news coverage to authors."

"How is this different? Jess is on, like, every magazine right now. They even did a spread with him in _Vogue_."

"It's a picture of him with an adult version of that girl from _Thirteen_."

"Evan Rachel Wood?"

"Yeah. I guess there are lots of perks to being a recovering drug addict."

Rory said her goodbyes and hung up the phone. She didn't like sitting at home alone, but she hated calling her mother and interrupting her full life with her own transparent one. A part of Rory wanted to call up Jess, to say, You finally did it, I'm really proud of you, but you're also very stupid for doing heroin I can't believe you would try to kill youself like that—but the same thing was holding her back. She didn't have much to show for her work over the past few years besides a couple of talking pieces she'd picked up in foreign countries. She'd received some clay pottery from the Ivory Coast and a European-wired canister for distributing milk-based alcohol from Russia. In the back corner of the bedroom she had a silk Japanese folding screen, and in her living room she had an incense burner from Turkey. But besides her foreign trinkets? A couple of war stories, mostly of India and the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, but nothing earth shattering. She'd been around a couple times but she was no Daniel Pearl.

The syringe on the cover of _Five_ stared back at her from the living room floor, loaded and pointing east. Rory felt sick. I need to get out of here, she thought, this empty apartment is making me sick.

--

He stopped for dinner at a dive bar in a bumfuck town called Selma, just a few hours south of the North Carolina-Virginia border. The place was back in a hole of pines and oaks, gravel parking lot, crooked sign above the door than broadcast CLANCY'S in tall red letters. Jess had a cigarette in his mouth before he'd even made it across the doorway.

One of the rules of NA was total abstinence from all drugs, even alcohol. Jess had always had a problem with authority.

There was no sign that asked _Please wait to be seated_. The looks from the patrons said it all: you gonna stand there all night or what? He pulled out a chair at the bar and quietly smoked his cigarette. A waitress in cutoffs approached him, looking down at an ordering pad with a pencil in her mouth. She whipped it out and stared him down. "Can I interest you in a Carolina Blonde?"

"Excuse me?"

"Or a Ying Ling, we've got a couple others on draft but those are the big sellers this evenin'."

"Can I get a Makers' Mark," Jess said, reading the menu that looked lonesome next to all the beer bottles in the room, "and some fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, corn on the cob, a large glass of sweet tea, and some banana pudding?"

His waitress wasn't wearing any makeup and she didn't have pierced ears. It was almost like she was a pubescent Puritan serving out freshly churned, deep fried butter.

"White corn or yellow?"

"Yellow."

Jess dug around in his pocket for some change and walked over to the pay phone in the back. His cell phone was offering a defiant No Service, so he slid a couple of quarters into the plastic slot and dialed Luke's number.

After a couple rings a breathless voice picked up. "Lorelai Danes."

"Hey, Lorelai. Is Luke there?"

"No and I don't have a pen or paper and I've got even less time to find one—"

"Just hang up," Jess suggested. "I'll call again and get the machine."

He could hear her hopping on one foot, the sharp sound of heels in hardwood. "That's why they pay you the big bucks, right? I gotta go Jess. I'll tell Luke you called."

"Thanks."

_Ping_. Disconnected. He redialed, waited, and left his message. "Hey, Luke. I've got the number and the address for where I'm going to be for the next couple of months. It's in New Orleans, sort of. It's not actually in the city but it's just outside the Quarter. 224 Rue Kennedy, 70166. The home number is 504-253-5214. It's Friday night, a little after six. Give me a call when you get a chance."

AN: First Rory sighting! There will be more, I promise. I would really appreciate the feedback. I would also like to continue this as a romance, but if there isn't enough interest then I'd like to find out what I can improve. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read.


End file.
